April 24, 2023
Ian Lustick, University of Pennsylvania, will present The Molly and Wayne Borges Memorial Lecture.
Why have Israelis and Palestinians failed to achieve a two-state solution to the conflict that has cost so much and lasted so long? Whose interests are served by decades of a peace process merry-go-round and by the mirage of eventual success? If Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews can agree on neither a state for each nor a state for both, then what way forward is there? In this lecture, Professor Ian Lustick argues that protracted, identity-based conflicts are never solved by clever compromises arrived at through negotiations between antagonists. He explains the failure of negotiations toward a two-state solution by showing how the combination of Zionism’s partially successful Iron Wall strategy for dealing with Arabs, an Israeli political culture saturated with “Holocaustia,” and the Israel lobby’s dominant influence on American policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict scuttled efforts to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But there is hope. By appreciating the long-term political decisiveness of the unintended consequences of attempts to do other things, he shows how the one-state reality sets the stage for new struggles and “better problems” for both Israel and the Palestinians. Drawing on the history of scientific ideas that once seemed certain but were ultimately discarded, Lustick encourages shifting attention from impossible-to-implement blueprints for two-states to the democratizing competition that arises when different subgroups, forced to be part of the same polity, redefine their interests and form new alliances to pursue them.
This joint event is sponsored by St. John’s Episcopal Church in Carlisle and the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.
For more information and a link to the livestream visit: https://www.clarkeforum.org/monday-april-24-2023/
Livestream link only: https://youtu.be/r9g1k6M3i0k
Further information
- Location:
- Time: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
- Cost: Free